From the river to the sea: where does the slogan come from and what does it mean?

Andy McDonald was suspended from the Labour party for borrowing from the phrase, which some say advocates the eradication of Israel

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“We won’t rest until we have justice, until all people, Israelis and Palestinians, between the river and the sea can live in peaceful liberty,” said Andy McDonald, a Labour MP, at a protest in London organised by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

Three days later, McDonald was suspended from the party pending an investigation, leaving the former shadow cabinet minister sitting as an independent for now.

Some feel the decision was heavy handed while others see it as a sign of strong leadership from Keir Starmer as the Labour leader tries to draw a clear line between himself and his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn.

The key to understanding why the party reacted so strongly is six words from McDonald’s speech – and the context in with they were spoken.

“Between the river and the sea” is a fragment from a slogan used since the 1960s by a variety of people with a host of purposes. And it is open to an array of interpretations, from the genocidal to the democratic.

The full saying goes: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” – a reference to the land between the Jordan River, which borders eastern Israel, and the Mediterranean Sea to the west.

The question then is what that means for Israel and the Jewish people.

Some claim the terminology is laced with genocidal intent. In 1966, the Syrian leader Hafez al-Assad, the father of the country’s current dictator, said: “We shall only accept war and the restoration of the usurped land … to oust you, aggressors, and throw you into the sea for good.”

Hamas, whose gunmen killed 1,400 people on 7 October, claim the slogan in their rejection of Israel.

“Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea,” says the organisation’s 2017 constitution.

The home secretary, Suella Braverman, tweeted after recent UK protests – in which thousands chanted “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” – that the slogan was “widely understood as a demand for the destruction of Israel”. She added: “Attempts to pretend otherwise are disingenuous.”

Hers is a commonly held view, albeit one that is vigorously countered by those who regard such characterisations as an attempt to close down debate.

In 2021, the Palestinian-American writer Yousef Munayyer argued that those who saw genocidal ambition in the phrase, or indeed an unambiguous desire for the destruction of Israel, did so due to their own Islamophobia.

It was instead, he argued, merely a way to express a desire for a state in which “Palestinians can live in their homeland as free and equal citizens, neither dominated by others nor dominating them”.

The context and the intent is key. The founding charter of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party trolls: “Between the sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”

With the language being so loaded, so contentious, and uttered at a time of a huge rise in antisemitic attacks, it was felt by Labour that McDonald had erred into the offensive. The former shadow chancellor John McDonnell noted that his friend had not used the full slogan, however.

McDonald will need to explain why he used any of it weeks after the horrors of 7 October, and at a time of fresh despair and anger at the scenes unfolding in Gaza under Israeli fire. Again, intent and context will be key.

This article was amended on 2 November 2023. The subheading was changed to make clear what Andy McDonald had said.

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